Lauren Grossman

“For the last several years, I have been making sculpture and installations engaging the peculiarities of the judeo/christian legacy. The religious images which were once an assumed vocabulary of western visual culture have become strange and a bit archaic, but are still potent. Using everything from levers to artificial hearts, I have found mechanical metaphors particularly suited to thinking about the functions of religion and faith. For the most part, the devices I use are passive, requiring the viewer to actually or mentally complete the system. It is a sort of do-it-yourself approach involving the labor of cranking, pumping, grinding, or simply turning on the gas.

“The materials as well as the allusions in my sculpture have the quality of being well worn. The resins tend to be lumpy, yellowed, and encrusted with insects. The machinery is mostly salvaged industrial scrap, (a blender motor, parts of a photostat camera, a car jack...), reconfigured into new devices while still retaining a memory of some former use. The physical evidence of damage and repair adds a sense of history to the reworking of old sources in the light of the present moment.”

Lauren Grossman has been exhibiting her work for over thirty years in diverse venues as the Wright Exhibition Space, the Kirkland Art Center, the John Michael Koehler Art Center, Oregon State University, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Cornish College of the Arts, University of Puget Sound, as well as galleries in the Northwest and nationally. Her work can be found in the collections of Microsoft, the John Michael Kohler Art Center, the City of Seattle, Special Collections at the University of Washington, the Matthews Collection at the Arizona State University, as well as several private collections.